Author: Tyler Durden

Submitted by Erico Matias Tavares of Sinclair & Co. A Close Encounter With Jon Corzine We got caught in the MF Global debacle as a client of their UK subsidiary. Little did we know at the time that our view of the financial markets would change forever – as a result of faulty regulations and, above all, faulty bosses. * * * MF Global Goes Bust Jon Corzine had an illustrious career in investment banking, rising to the very top of Goldman Sachs, until he got pushed out in 1999. He subsequently decided to try his luck in politics, and … Continue reading →

Things on the West Coast Ports are going from bad to worse (for those who missed it read “Catastrophic Shutdown Of America’s Supply Chain” Begins: Stunning Photos Of West Coast Port Congestion), and with no resolution in sight, it is now beginning to cripple the US economy. Here is a brief summary, courtesy of the WSJ, of how the near-strike is already impacting various businesses across the US: Ocean carrier Maersk Line has canceled some sailings, while China Ocean Shipping (Group) Co. said it will skip at least one port Shipping line CMA CGM Group said it has “adapted its … Continue reading →

Over the weekend we got the latest confirmation that when it comes to enabling of tax evasion and parking of criminal money, HSBC is second only to US real estate in catering to shady offshore oligarchs, dictators, rock stars, monarchs, and even outright criminals. What happened was the following: The French newspaper Le Monde obtained a version of the tax authority data, which covers accounts of more than 100,000 clients (individuals and legal entities) from more than 200 countries. The newspaper shared it with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with the agreement that it would assemble a global team … Continue reading →

Following yesterday’s summary of the utter farce that the Minsk Summit/Ukraine “peace” deal talks have become, the various parties involved appear to be fracturing even faster today. The headlines are coming thick and fast but most prescient appears to be: Despite John Kerry’s denial of any split between Germany and US over arms deliveries to Ukraine, German Foreign Minister Steinmeier slammed Washington’s strategy for being “not just risky but counterproductive.” But perhaps most significantly is France’s continued apparent pivot towards Russia… Following Francois Hollande’s calls for greater autonomy for Eastern Ukraine, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has come out in … Continue reading →

While today surprised some with its lack of images of Greeks standing in line furiously pulling cash from bank ATMs, as Bloomberg reports, Greeks are anxiously stashing cash in the most unusual places… As Bloomberg reports, in the days after Tsipras’s election, the nation’s banks found themselves busy again… The teller at National Bank of Greece SA leaned forward to tell one customer something he’s noticed over the past few days. “Had you come in last week, without warning, I wouldn’t have been able to give you so much cash,” he said in a low voice to the client withdrawing … Continue reading →

Having noted that voter angst has been riled, propagandized, and fear-mongered to the point at which the most pressing priority for Congress is to ‘fix’ terrorism, it is perhaps not entirely surprising that we discover – deep down in the archives – that giving the public someone to ‘hate’ as opposed to something may have been an entire fiction. As The New York Times exposed in 2007, Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi, the titular head of the Islamic State, according to Brigadier General Kevin Bergner – the chief American military spokesman at the time – never existed (and was actually a fictional … Continue reading →

Three weeks ago, when looking at the latest NY Fed data of foreign gold held at the largest central bank gold vault in the world, we showed that in the month of November not only was a near record amount of gold withdrawn from the NY Fed, which at 42 tons was the single biggest monthly outflow at the NY Fed in over a decade… … but that though the end of November, all of the Netherlands’ 122 tons of gold withdrawals had been fully accounted for. This brought up an interesting question: “… net of the Netherlands withdrawals, there … Continue reading →

Back in November, before most grasped just how serious the collapse in crude was (and would become, as well as its massive implications), we wrote “How The Petrodollar Quietly Died, And Nobody Noticed“, because for the first time in almost two decades, energy-exporting countries would pull their “petrodollars” out of world markets in 2015. This empirical death of Petrodollar followed years of windfalls for oil exporters such as Russia, Angola, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. Much of that money found its way into financial markets, helping to boost asset prices and keep the cost of borrowing down, through so-called petrodollar recycling. … Continue reading →

It was less than 48 hours ago when Turkey’s prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, joined millions marching in Paris to pay tribute to the 17 people killed by ISIS-supporting extremists. Then, almost the moment he got back, things changed, and as the FT politely paraphrases what transpired, the “country’s president struck a much more confrontational tone.” That’s one way of putting it. Another is that the former PM and current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, of NATO-member Turkey did the unthinkable: accused the west, and French citizens in particular, of staging the Charlie Hebdo murder in order to blame Muslims, even as … Continue reading →

As we recently noted, The Prison State of America is alive and well as our prison-industrial complex, which holds 2.3 million prisoners, or 25 percent of the world’s prison population, makes money by keeping prisons full. While the statistics are mind-boggling, we thought it particularly ironic that on the day when President Obama officially launched his “free community-college for all” plan, that we point out there are more jails than colleges in America… and here’s where they live… As The Washington Post shows, It’s often been remarked that our national incarceration rate of 707 adults per every 100,000 residents is … Continue reading →